What do you plan to use WAV files for, for which Ogg files aren't better? WAV files are most commonly uncompressed, and there's a size limit for attachments.

Ogg, mp3, etc. are lossy. Now consider this thread -- you don't want to do that kind of analysis using a lossy format if it can be avoided. So, for that circumstance (i.e. it's subjective), WAV is a better choice. Plus it's a "convenient" format that most utilities can read. That's all.

FLAC provides better lossless compression of audio than ZIP, if you're looking for something that achieves that, but if there's a file size limit I don't really see what's unacceptable about WAVs either.

Well, I suppose there might be a pedantic argument in favor of FLAC, then...

But that wouldn't solve Zepper's wish, which was not having to do an extra round of processing before uploading it.

(Whether the board should consider accommodating that laziness in its users is, I guess, the actual question. And factors include "just how cheap is disk and bandwidth and how much better is a ZIPed WAV vs in-line http gzip compression vs FLAC")

They can, but you have to download and install extra plugins, which is always an annoyance. Alternatively you can download flac, and uncompress the data to wav in the command line.

I can see that in some cases for small audio samples, uisng zip or 7z on a wav file can be more desirable than FLAC even if the compresison ration is much worse, because you just want to avoid people to download FLAC plugins for their audio software.

Also there exist a large number of formats providing typically better lossless compression than FLAC, but those are typically not GNU/Free.

Also there exist a large number of formats providing typically better lossless compression than FLAC, but those are typically not GNU/Free.

I don't know about "large number" that are better than FLAC, but it's true there are a large number of lossless audio formats, and some of them do compress slightly more than FLAC. (There's a significant performance tradeoff as compression increases.)

FLAC and Apple's format are the only two that I commonly encounter, though. Several commonly used utilities handle one or both of these formats at this point without having to download a separate plugin. Audacity, Winamp, VLC, SMPlayer, WMP 12, and many others do FLAC out of the box right now.

The other reason why I don't see a problem with WAV is that lossless audio compression is really only about ~50% compression. So... it makes a difference but it's not like WAV is insane by comparison. Even just ZIP is an reasonable in-between compromise here.

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